Innovation in education sounds like a really good idea, I mean, how can you not be all for innovation in education, especially when the promise is to make students smarter, teacher’s lives easier, and the subject matter more interesting? Unfortunately, it’s not all positive. There are several missing pieces of the puzzle that should be addressed before attempting to innovate.
The first and foremost issue standing in the way of innovative education are conservative policies, administrators, and teachers. It’s important to lump parents in here, but one can assume that parents are either on the teacher’s side or aren’t. Hopefully, most will be on the teacher’s side. Overcoming these conservative constraints won’t be easy and may require an equally conservative, measured approach to innovation.
For the teacher contemplating innovation, it might be helpful to understand what innovation in education means. According to the UNICEF website, it means…
Innovation in education means solving a real problem in a new, simple way to promote equitable learning.
The complexity of simplicity in this case is overlooked, but the point remains to promote equitable learning. Equitable, one assumes by making the resources available to as wide a range of learners as possible. Equitable is also dirty word to conservatives. The more money-making side of innovation in education doesn’t really focus on equity so much as high powered consultancy for curriculum, pushing bleeding edge technologies with dubious promise (smart boards, anyone?), or other expensive learning objects (I am talking about immersive years abroad, and environmental field trips, etc.) that are out of the reach of most public school budgets.
Much of the innovation debate is out of the hands of professors and teachers. The main drive needs to come from politicians and administrators, who, mostly prefer to blame those same profs and teachers for their lack of innovation. Most teachers I know would become innovating fools if they got any support at all for innovation in their classrooms.
So, how do you innovate in your classroom with few resources, and little, if any, support? Here are a few of the things I do that may help you become a more innovation-focused professional.
- Read a lot. Keep up with the business world. Try typing “innovative class exercises” into Google’s search engine. You could ask AI, though until I actually do it, I won’t endorse it.
- Find your like-minded community of educators. Yes, at least one of the people you work with wants to try what you are doing, or they have something you want to try. Talk to them. Communication is key, people.
- Take little steps if you aren’t sure of what you are doing. Take bigger steps after you evaluate for effectiveness. Students are not immune to the shock of rapid change. Neither are your administrators. I will be implementing (without permission, of course), asynchronous classes during exam weeks. At my university, classes continue normally even though exams are happening in other classes. My students are wont to pay attention or do anything for my class if they have high stakes exams in their other hours of instruction. I took little steps at first to implement my plan.
- My classes meet twice a week for two hours each meeting. I began by doing half lessons during our class hours, with the other half off for students to study and/or prepare for their upcoming exams. Positive feedback and increased attention to their learning during my class encouraged me to allow for complete study hall kind of days, but with work waiting for them in the class LMS.
- After evaluating student feedback and the level of assignment completion, I opted to just switch everything over to an asynchronous class. These will occur during the next set of exams, in about a month. I will make myself available during usual class hours just in case students need help. I will report here how it went.
Does this project reflect what people would consider an innovative mindset? In my opinion it does. It’s equitable, it’s simple, and solves a problem (students devoting time to other classes while ignoring my material). It’s cost-effective, makes use of available technology, and materials
What else can this little project show? We have a classroom shortage on our campus. Showing that hybrid classes can work could be a viable solution to the problem. Of course, someone needs to go first, it might as well be me.
As for this blog space. I will be adding more innovative ideas here, as well as commentary. I hope you will like what you will find here. Also, why not consider me as part of your community of action! We can innovate and educate together!